Welfare States and Europeanisation. Explaining Convergence and Path Dependency by combining Multiple Streams Framework and Historical Institutionalism

This paper aims to explain the affects of Europeanization on the process of welfare state policies by combining the Multiple Streams Framework with the Historical Institutionalism. The guiding questions are: Under which circumstances does European integration leads to a convergence of policies? And, what are the mechanisms that maintain path dependency? These thoughts will be illustrated by three case studies which deal with labour market reforms in Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden which took place over the last two decades. By employing Historical Institutionalism, the pressure of Europeanization on national welfare states as well as their resistance and path dependency can be explained. Furthermore, the often criticised neglect of institutions in the Multiple Streams Framework can be eased. Europeanization leads to convergence by two mechanisms: negative integration excludes certain options of the national policy stream and framing integration generates pressure to adopt policies via policy-diffusion and -learning. But the development of convergence is contingent; because of path dependency adjustment pressure does not have a deterministic effect. To operationalize path dependency, I make two modifications to the Multiple Stream Framework. First, because institutions affect both technical feasibility and value acceptability, I replace these two criteria by institutional compatibility. Second, I focus on the degree of dependency of policy stream and political stream in the different welfare regimes. The mechanisms which affect this can serve as an explanation for the openness to ideas and actors steaming from the European level and thus for maintenance or breaking of path dependency. Additionally, policy change requires specific opportunities which have to be taken into account by the actors involved. By identifying the entrepreneurs’ techniques applied to manipulate the context of reforms by blame avoiding and issue framing, path-deviant reforms can be explained even under unlikely institutional conditions.